The new one looks nice tho. And looks like it is less BS than Contra 3 and Contra 4. Only shame is that it didn't take the torch of Hard Corps... Which, TBMFH, NO CONTRA DID! Hard Corps is the only Contra with multiple routes, multiple endings tied to the route.
GryZor sounds like the fake video game in a cartoon. I love the Contra series but I can't believe I never knew of all those cool graphical changes in the NES Japanese version
That goemon interlude got me. I mean maybe they are "too japanese" for your regular consumer and the humor is.... so weird but man they are good. Ganbare goemon 2 (and somewhat 3 & 4) is sooooo good and both the N64 american releases are just sooo damn fun, the music is godly, there no excuse really. Tbh a lot of goemon games are pretty bad like... the NES ones... but it really hurts me that we got barely any releases and so ppl never talk about goemon at all. Thanks for mentioning it.
I always imagined a timeline where Konami continued Contra and Castlevania and even made a crossover called "ContraVania." Plot: aliens try to resurrect Dracula. Imagine a game that plays like Contra and Castlevania, you can play as characters from both and have powerups from both. "Spread whip" is one of dumbest most beautiful things I've ever heard in my life.
You know what? I always wondered what a Contra/Castlevania crossover would have been like as well. Would you be playing as a Belmont, a Lecarde, and/or a Belnades in the distant future aiding Bill Rizer and Lance Bean as they take down the evil forces of Red Falcon? Would you be able to attack with both the Spread Gun AND the Vampire Killer? Would Alucard, now some 900 years older, be in the game? I believe Konami circa 1990-1995 could have pulled this off, too. I think the idea is and would have been absurd, but also extremely fun.
Issue: Balance. Why would you ever play as Simon Belmont with committed jump arc when you could play as Bill Rizer who can shoot a spread gun in 8 directions? Castlevania peeps have healthbar, but that isn't that much of an advantage when Contra guys can just obliterate all medusa heads in front of them by mashing fire.
"No one gets Contra games! Konami doesn't even make them anymore! So all's well that ends well." Ah, to be so innocent in 2018, in the time before Rogue Corps.
@@Loader2K1 True that. Nintendo had a well-intentioned but poorly executed policy meant to prevent flooding the market with shovelware while Sega basically just IGNORED its American division as being "rude and unknowledgeable."
@@OtakuUnitedStudio: Ironically enough, in the later and twilight years of the NES (1991-1994), the console got flooded with shovelware from such terrible, non-Japanese developers and publishers such as the now-defunct Ocean (which never truly went away; it's still around under the branding of Atari), the now-defunct THQ (long before the company would hit paydirt with the WWF/E license in the late 1990s all the way into the early 2010s), Camerica, Codemasters, MicroProse, LJN, and Hi-Tech Expressions, to name a few. As for Sega, in my humble opinion, both their North American subsidiary and parent Japanese company are to blame for them leaving the video game industry as a first-party company. Between late 1994 and early 1998, the company as a whole was on a downward spiral. This was due to the infighting and miscommunications between Sega of America and Sega of Japan. SOJ apparently thought they knew better than SOA, the division of Sega that was once raking in the cash thanks to Tom Kalinske. To make matters worse, they ousted Kalinske for former Sony Computer Entertainment America president/plant, Bernie Stolar, who nearly ran SOA into the ground by fucking over North American Saturn owners. Stolar chose not to release a LOT of third-party games on the Saturn in North America, and he ultimately and prematurely pulled the plug on the console. Sega shortly turned themselves around with the Dreamcast, but, according to Sega Reniassance ( segareniassance.blogspot.com/2016/03/op-ed-bernie-stolar-and-isao-okawa-dumb.html ), pulled the plug on that console in the West because the SOJ president at the time, Isao Okawa, wanted to take the company out of the video game industry.
ninjacape / if you are able to beat Bayou Billie you are pretty much a God in my eyes. It’s unnecessarily difficult...so much so that it’s no fun. Mad City is a great game and totally worth finishing. I LOVE difficult games, I loath games that are basically unbeatable simply because of Blockbuster video and rentals. I realize it’s just my opinion and it’s worth nothing but...there you go. ;)
Omg the psycho mantis fight reading your hard drive joke was comedy gold and definitely one of the best comedy skits I’ve seen in RU-vid for a long time.
A little disappointed you didn't spend more time on Castlevania III. On top of changes to the music and some graphics, several gameplay elements got changed for the US version (for the worse). Particularly Grant simply stabbing with his knife instead of throwing it, and the mechanics of enemy damage. In the JP version, different enemies deal differing amounts of damage, while in the US version, all enemies deal the same amount of damage, with that amount ramping up as the game progresses. It seriously alters the balance of the game. Lumped together, these make for compelling reasons to stick with the JP version of Castlevania III over the US one.
Thanks ! I was going to comment on that exact thing. Also, the fact that Contra - and Castlevania III - didn't get their extra chips in the West because Nintendo didn't allow that, not because Konami didn't want to produce them.
And let’s not forget how in the US version, dying to Dracula forces you to repeat the pendulum room, which itself was made harder by adding bats to assault you, while in the JP version, dying to Dracula just sends you back to the staircase right before him.
@@blara2401 I thought that Contra and CV3 for the market outside Japan didn't have the additional chips because the "western" NES model lacks the extra pins in the cartridge slot required to support it.
Lovely video! Random Contra censorship note: the WiiWare exclusive Contra ReBirth changed the evil end boss from Hitler (in Japan) to a lizard guy (in NA and EU) called Plissken!
@@somethingsomething9008 I knew where most of the games I played were made, who they were made by. I read magazines. Assuming your question means how did I know which games came from Japan.
@@somethingsomething9008 Oh, yeah. Sorry. Well that came a bit later than the nes era, in my teens, information started to become more abundant and easily access, ya know? When the internet really took hold from the early/mid 90s and so on. I didn't mean to imply I knew games were changed for localization in the 80s of anything.
Rondo of Blood also saw a US release on the Wii Virtual Console. Also worth noting in regards to Probotector, the character itself is playable on Contra Rebirth for WiiWare. But yeah, I like this idea and obviously we’ll see episodes of Capcom, Nintendo, Square, Sega, and Sony but it does give me a suggestion for a Punching Weight episode, Western Made Games Released Exclusively in Japan
@@GiordanDiodato They screwed over a lot of people, but yeah... Then again, we got some things the US did not, notably Terranigma. (That's published by Enix though, so not the same thing prior to the merger) Everyone should have gotten both Terranigma and Chrono Trigger though. Seiken Densetsu 3 would've been nice too... Apparently that was never ported because Squaresoft didn't want to pay the costs associated with it. It's already a very large ROM, and English translations require more space than the japanese text. (you can see this with the Pokemon games - japanese game roms are much smaller than western versions of the game.) This also plagued Secret of Mana before it, since, although the ROM is about the same size as the japanese version, (which already has about 40% of it's intended content missing since it was supposed to be a SNES CD game but that never came out), the English translation is extremely simplified and cut down due to lack not having a large enough cartridge available. Though my guess is it's more that they're cheapskates and didn't want to pay for the extra ROM required, rather than it not being technically possible. A Snes can support at a bare minimum, 13 megabyte cartridges after all, on a purely technical level, yet the largest games ever released topped out at 6 megabytes...
Contra III in the West actually had the codes for 30 lives, level select, and the sound test taken out of it for whatever reason Even weirder is that the 30 lives code for it is the motion for a Hadouken instead of the usual Konami Code
Konami was well aware of the Code's popularity by the time of Contra III's release, so by then they played with players' expectations by changing up the code itself and/or its effects - remember Gradius III on the SNES and how the standard Code in there is essentially a suicide button, with the real deal being the one where Left and Right are swapped by L and R? :B
Not only that. In the EU/US, to get the ending, you had to beat to game on hard. The Japanese got it on any difficulty. Curse that rental market, right?
@@NosferatuMalus: As fucked up as the video game industry is now, how fucked up it used to be in the 8-bit and 16-bit era is unbelievable. Japanese gamers had to buy their video games outright, which, while expensive, were much more balanced and enjoyable experiences. North American and European gamers, on the other hand, had the option of renting a game until they're done with it in contrast to buying expensive video games, but had to deal with absurd difficulty spikes, dumbed down or entirely-deleted content, or getting screwed out of great video games from Japan altogether. Well, at least we had the Game Genie and Pro Action Replay to use to finally see the end of nearly unbeatable games.
"re-imagining" works for something like Dracula X but I tend to use the word "conversion" because it was always used to refer to arcade home ports like what we saw on NES, where everything from Ninja Gaiden to Bionic Commando and Guerilla War were vastly different games at home. The terminology carried forward in my memories of the SNES and Genesis era with it's totally different licensed games like Aladdin, Taz, Turtles In Time vs Hyperstone Heist etc.
K I've been following the channel since before he moved. I always used to hope I'd run into him at Bosco's sizing up the NES games for any hidden gems. Seeing that bit of my own personal history with the Snake's Revenge cart was really cool. :-) (And I can't figure out how people are getting these @'s to work all of a sudden.)
OneColdMonkey too funny. I just asked if he was from Anchortown. Good ol Video City...I remember them being known for their “Adult” sections when I was a kid,
Like all the third parties, Konami had to use mapper chips supplied by Nintendo for the western markets in place of their custum chips used for the japanese versions. Nintendo did this to avoid the risk of third parties being able to produce carts by themselves and flood the US market like it happened during the Atari 2600 era.
I heard that story as well, but I also heard, in the case of Castlevania 3: Dracula's Curse, the NES had some expansion slot at the bottom of it that could have used Konami's special chips, but it was never used.
@@GiordanDiodato: I have no idea, but I'm guessing that, if Nintendo of America had used that expansion slot on the bottom of the NES like Nintendo of Japan did with the Famicom, we probably would have been able to experience Castlevania 3 the way it was intended to be experienced. Well, from an audible standpoint, at least. I'm pretty sure Konami of America would have still jacked up the difficulty to the point where use of a Game Genie was understandable.
@@GiordanDiodato: Again, I have no idea. You might be able to if you have a modded NES or one of these reproduction NES consoles with both NES and Famicom support.
At least they still made great games and released them in the West. I miss the Konami of old. They went out as one of the worst video game companies of all time. Their management treats their employees like prisoners and they have absolutely no respect for them, no matter how much they've done for them. They have no respect for their IPs. They have no respect for their customers. After everything they've done I'm surprised they're even still making games, even if they are mostly low budget garbage now.
nick malcom Then stole all your passwords and logged on to all your accounts and trolled and made fraudulent purchases, then SWATted you with the police. XD
Dracula X appeared because an exclusivity contract Nintendo use with third parties. Konami could not make a port of Rondo. Konami used assets and remade the OST but changing certain parts to elude Nintendo.
I never got to play the two titles for the N64. I REALLY wanted to. They looked awesome. Blockbuster never had any copies. But I got to play Chameleon Twist so that's SORT of a consolation?
I'd argue we're not missing too much. The Super Nintendo/Famicom (Specifcally the platformers), 64, and two of the PS1 games are worth one's time. Maybe the DS one? Never played that. That sounds like a lot, but the rest amounts to board, party, RPG(s?), or mediocre platformers particularly with the PS1 and the one on PS2.
I would totally watch a whole series on how certain companues were worse in the west or even vice versa. It's interesting stuff and I found myself engaged by your delivery and commentary.
The thing that always amused me about Konami and Capcom back then is that they seemed to take opposing views of changing difficulty for Western releases. Many Capcom games were made easier for the West (Ghouls n Ghosts, Super GnG, Megaman 2) while many Konami games were made harder, like Super C, Turtles 2, Turtles in Time, Castlevania IV, etc. Of course sometimes they were harder just because they took out the cheat codes!
Yes and no actually. For Capcom they made varying degrees of difficulty for the west (MM1 Bionic Commando, Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, Darkwing Duck) but usually if the game was challenging by default (Ghost's Goblins, Ghosts n' Ghouls, Super GnG, both Gargoyle's Quests), it wasn't noticed as much. I'd disagree about your Konami picks though: Super C was much easier than Contra, TMNT 2 is easier than TMNT1 by a long shot, Turtles in Time had different difficulty levels, Super CV 4 is considered one of the best of the NES/SNES era of CV games and was not considered unfairly difficult. Now, Mad City/Bayou Billy was an unfairly difficult game in the west by Konami, to an extent Goonies 2 was aswell (very much due to it's butchered translation and being difficult to know how to progress beyond trial and error on every room).
rugalb98 I think you misunderstood what I meant. I wasn’t saying games like Super C and TMNT were easier/harder than the previous games in their series, I meant the US releases were made a easier than the Japanese releases. Although in the case of Super C it’s because they took the 30 lives cheat out! 😅
Xulomander Yes that’s true, some games were made harder. I’d love to know why Capcom thought turning the auto-aim off in Resident Evil was a good idea! Obviously it was only a temporary decision as it was back on for the Director’s Cut!
If you needed 30 lives for Super C (specially when most kids had played Contra) you didn't bother learning the game at all and used a programmer code to make the game play itself. The patterns are a lot easier, enemy projectiles were bigger and clearer to see the only inherent difficulty spike that the programmers put in was using the Spreader (it made bosses have double health and spawn more running enemies on the levels). Super C was waaaaaaay easier than Contra and doesn't count as a Western difficulty spike. TMNT was just frustrating altogether for either Eastern or Western audiences, but the sole reason it was a hit regardless was that it came out during TMNT's prominence in media culture. Still have no idea why he didn't include the Mad City/Bayou Billy difference. That was a clear indication of Konami being a dick to Western gamers (specially with how much attention the game got in previews, write ups, and commercials).
Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon and its N64 sequel will very likely never ever be rereleased. At least not through official emulation as both were some of the few N64 titles that required the memory card.
Arcadian Legend if Sony could do proper memory card emulation on the PS3, Nintendo should just as easily be able to do the same! If I were to do an N64 mini: - controllers would be USB-C, allowing for vibration and the controllers to also have external storage built in allowing for Controller Pak emulation - parental controls would be present, allowing parents to lock out T rated titles while their pre-teen offspring to play E rated titles Games: Super Mario 64 Mario Kart 64 Mystical Ninja starring Goemon Ms Pac Man Maze Madness Yoshi’s Story Rayman 2 The Great Escape Rakuga Kids Pokémon Snap Pokémon Puzzle League Pokémon Stadium (connection of a Game Boy Classic Edition would allow this one to be enjoyed in full) Bomberman 64 Mega Man 64 Pilotwings 64 F-Zero X Dr Mario 64 Excitebike 64 The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask Donkey Kong 64 Mario Party 3 BONUS GAME The Legend of Zelda Master Quest
I don't see how that's relevant. Emulating the memory card isn't exactly a major challenge compared to having an n64 emulator in general. It's really just a minor functional variant on s-ram within cartridges... If you can emulate one, you can emulate the other. No, the reasons for not officially re-releasing games are rarely technical (well, maybe - the virtual console didn't seem to have any SuperFX games on it. Though again the reasons could be non-technical too), but more frequently ideological or legal. Goldeneye for instance has the exceptionally unfortunate combination of being developed by Rare, Published by Nintendo AND being a licensed game. That's an absolutely terrible combination legally speaking. (how many games with 3rd party licenced content have been officially re-released in general? I can think of some, but not many...) Though not as bad as dealing with games where ownership at this point is just plain uncertain... Like a developer or publisher that no longer exists for instance. Or even where they do, where it's unclear what the exact ownership implications might be. Take Terranigma - a frequently overlooked SNES action RPG that is perhaps one of the system's most significant yet forgotten games. This was published by Enix, but created but developed by a company that no longer exists. (the previous game from that developer was even published by Enix in Japan and Nintendo in the US and Europe - Terranigma itself got a European release, but not a US one, which is the opposite of the far more famous Chrono Trigger.) So the developer no longer exists, and Enix merged with Squaresoft to form Square Enix - given that some of the games of this developer were published by multiple companies in different countries, it follows that the legal rights may not have belonged to Enix... So... What are the odds of this getting a re-release? Almost zero. As for a hypothetical N64 classic, realistically to properly reflect the best of the system it should include Rareware games... Alas, that seems incredibly unlikely given the current situation. Still, I struggle to imagine doing the n64 justice without having Banjo Kazooie, Goldeneye, and perhaps something like blast corps as well. (personally it'd also feel off if it lacked Conker's Bad Fur day and Perfect Dark, but those games, while amazing were less popular, and thus not exactly iconic as such...)
This N64 Mystical Ninja was one of my favourite childhood games. It's painful they don't make them like that anymore... or they do and I've just never seen them..
Me too, that was first distinctly "Japanese" game Id played, and was for many people. It was a miracle it even had an international release at the time, I think it still holds up compared to other N64 games.
@@JetWolfEX It does but anytime I try to emulate it (I don't own a WiiU and it ain't on Switch) it's very poor quality. Skybox doesn't work, laggy. I know Project 64 is average but it runs most games sweet.
The Metal Gear segment is missing the rawest deal the West got. When the Metal Gear Solid The Essential Collection got released, it only included MGS 1, 2, and 3 (with 2 and 3 having the updated versions included), but Japan got all of that plus VR Missions, Portable Ops, Metal Gear 1 and 2, and an assortment of special features that weren't included in the Western release.
Rondo of Blood is amazing. I just finally played it last year and I was blown away. Easily the best Castlevania IMO. Symphony of the Night would be there if the game wasn't too easy (I almost never say that about anything).
Excellent video; I'd love to see more. :> Vaguely related: all these alternative versions of Castlevania games are a large part of the reason why I've barely played the series; I generally go in release order and treat remakes as separate games, and there are like fifty different versions of Castlevania 1 scattered across regions and consoles, all of them just different enough to be distinct games.
@@GiordanDiodato That's the thing: it's essentially a different game from the original. I'd rather play the original first so I can understand what's different and judge the changes on my own.
Fun fact Bayou Billy was supposed to be based on Crocodile Dundee but Konami never got the rights for it. The famicom artwork to Mad City even resembles Paul Hogan.
Probotector = Protector + Robot. Fun fact. Poland didn't get the censored version. We had the pirated Soviet Famiclones, so we had the "original" Contra on multicarts.
I just gotta say, I know you've been making videos without the HVGN moniker for awhile now, but since you moved on from that point in time, your content has absolutely FLOURISHED in terms of quality. I remember back when you first announced that you were ending the HVGN name and were gonna start making a name for yourself. That, to me, translated to "I'm gonna do a few more things with this channel at most then fade into obscurity". I'm glad to say that you've stuffed my expectations for you down my own throat and then some. Keep up the awesome work Derek. Happy Holidays!
.... Thanks for reminding me that just recently, I found out that he's the old HVGN. Branching out and moving out of James' shadow REALLY did wonders for Derek!
Man, I feel you with the Goemon games. I fell in love with Mystical Adventures as a kid and have always wanted more. Also, while we may not have any more Contra games, can we get a shoutout for Hard Corps. Uprising? It's fantastic and so much fun!
I'm surprised that you didn't mention that the US version of CV3 is way harder than Akumajou Densetsu. Also, I'm glad they fixed the painful dialog in Symphony. I can now play it without my ears bleeding.
Yeah, that's definitely the reason for the change. What weirds me out about it is how this policy only seems to have become a thing by 1994, pretty late into the Genesis/MD's lifespan...
@@thestripedmenace Much like Ninja Gaiden 3's changes to be harder, despite it being the last game of the series (at the time) and near the end of the NES's lifespan too. NG3 USA had double damage and limited continues.
@@thestripedmenace Also IMO is one of the things that ended up killing the Genesis as well. Since Sega made their games super difficult, and rarely gave options to save, many of their new games felt old school compared to many next gen games on the market.
@@Nandru85 Apparently it was intentional. It also had a password system that was omitted from the US edition. According to wikipedia, it never saw a EU release. It seemed that Tecmo had a different take on the US audience than Square did, so it wasn't a rental thing?!
Man, ive been keeping up with you ever since i found space money octogon years ago, and honestly, that goemon interlude is the best god damn thing; this episode in particular is seriously some of the best comedic timing on SSFF. Great stuff guys
As far as I know, with Metal gear there was two reasons for the changes, NES could not run the MSX games properly and Nintendo´s censorship. You know that was cold war era, and Metal gear was kind of sensitive material. But now when we have access to the Metal gear original games, instead of two classic Metal gear games we have *four* and as a Metal gear fan I think that is a win-win situation. And I prefer Snake´s Revenge over most of the modern Metal gear games. I never had problems with Contra/Probotector, actually I wish that Konami revives Probotector at someday. And back in the NES days I didn´t even know there was a sequel for Probotector. And also with Castlevania I think there was just hardware limitations, like SNES could not run Rondo of blood so they made the Vampire Kiss, which is not a bad game, it´s like Mega man 6 it´s not bad, but it´s just not as good as the predecessors.
Regional differences videos are important in an age where easy emulation and fan-translation patches allow gamers to enjoy classic games without botched localizations. Thanks!
Man, Contra Force was cool! It had one of the most '80s levels ever conceived: Walking on the wings of an airplane, crossing onto other airplanes, and fighting your way through hordes of bad guys to stop a nuclear bomb!
...shame they have the durability of a Trade Fed combat droid... unless you're building them en masse on the cheap, a combat robot needs to take more than one hit!
I agree. The story in the manual said something about these cool fighting robots being sent into warzones where humans could not go. I always thought they resembled the Terminator. When I found out that the USA had these generic muscular humans instead and was called 'Contra' was so confused xD Thinking about it, sure Probotector is a weird name but so is the name Contra... I know it's short for Contraband but even that doesn't make it any less weird. 'Probotector' to me sounds like 'Terminator' and just sounds cool
And the initial name for the "Super C" grocery store franchise was actually "Super Carnaval", they quickly (and wisely) opted to shorten it to Super C. So it made the name of the Contra sequel game even more hilarious in the 80s :)!
because the word "contra" was associated with the iran contra scandel when that port came out, this is probably also why the name wasn't used for the European releases (not just probotector but also the microcomputer ports of the first game which went by the japanese name, though the US computer versions of both games still used the contra and super contra names respectively).
There was a really weird situation when it came to the western release of the Tactics Ogre remake on the PSP. Interestingly they added a crap load of content, easily 100 hours or more on it's own, but then reduced stat growth by 10 times. On top of this they changed the weirdly included crafting fail rates to make them better....and gimped the AI...sort of. Namely the original AI was competent, sure, but no one wanted to sit through them passing along buffs for half an hour until one of their units could move. Still, it's fun to look through the Japanese version to see what could have been if they lef the AI in tact (Sometimes it's a bit retarded, so it's a bit jarring where in a couple battles they actually play it safe and hold formations. I've tested and even found they they actually removed the option for certain AI settings entirely, resulting in a unit just moving and doing nothing every 3-4 turns.)
Zatch Bell: Mamodo Battles is definitely a good example of this. The Japanese version could be considered a competitive fighter on its own, but the NTSC-U/PAL versions added a perfect shield bound to the block button that puts the attacker in hitstun, among many other things that dumbed down the game.
"No more staggered releases." I wish. Us Falcom fans are still waiting for the western release of Trails of Cold Steel III even after the FOURTH game was released in Japan. Hopefully there won't be such a ridiculous wait for the newly announced Ys IX.
it's probably due to how text-heavy CSIII is. It's more text-heavy compared to Trails in the Sky SC, which took 3 years to localize. Also the fact Falcom refuses to allow publishers the rights to their games till their next game comes out. I know, it's weird, but it's just how they roll. And don't get me started on how much Falcom milks their franchises...
Falcom is a very small company that only cares about Japan. Western releases are nothing but an afterthought. It also doesn't help that some of their games have scripts that can fill several books.
@@asteria9963 Yeah Sora SC has more than 720,000 words in it. For comparison, War & Peace has about 580,000 words, Atlas Shrugged has around 645,000 words, and Les Misérables has around 655,000 words. And both parts of Don Quixote combined is 345,000 words.
See though, falcom games have always been hit or miss as to if they will or won't come to the west. Even as of late, they're one of the major companies I can think of that's still like that for some bizarre reason
I made it into the top 50 worldwide ranking with that game. Unfortunately it's not really contra at all. You can type the konami code during stage 1 loading screen to get the jungle stage soundtrack remix which is cool but besides that the game was okay. Had its addictive moments Edit the code for the PS3 version is Up Up Down Down left right left right X O start.
Correction on NES Contra: Contra on Famicom used a Konami-developed mapper chip called the Virtual ROM Controller II (VRCII) to create more elaborate effects through bankswitching due to its increased CHR limit of 256KB and 1 bit latch. But it is factually incorrect that Konami "didn't want to produce that special chip [VRCII] for the international market." Unlike in Japan, _all_ licensed NES games were manufactured by Nintendo themselves. This meant that games were required to use mappers that Nintendo manufactured, which were at the time NROM, UNROM, CNROM, or at the high end, MMC1. Konami's custom mapper they developed wasn't used in the NES version because Nintendo didn't have access to it, and so the game was scaled back to fit within the limits of a mapper type Nintendo _could_ manufactre, UNROM requiring only an additional 8K 8SRAM chip.
As someone who first played this game on PC, I'm happy about its inclusion. That version is so rarely mentioned even though it's by far the best one available to the West. YOU CAN PLAY AS A GREY FOX! Edit: I'm kind of sad that you fall into the "Dracula X isn't Rondo, so it's a bad game." camp. I think Dracula X is still one of the best classic Castlevanias. Certainly better than 2 or Bloodlines. And as someone who personally thinks 4 is a bad game that just wows players with graphical effects and superfluous additions to the moveset, also that one.
I think he does this a lot. He OFTEN lets one small thing completely RUIN his perception of everything else about it and he is often disproportionately unfair about a LOT of things. It's the one thing that keeps me feeling very disappointed about a lot of his videos and his method of criticism. If i'm being honest, it's one reason why I havn't spoken with him personally or worked with him since HVGN and my logo which I made for him was retired. I was all for seeing what direction his videos would take. Instead, it's like his worst aspects have taken over almost everything he does now. Back then, my only major point of contention was his opinion on Krion Conquest and Zoda's Revenge. That was nothing. But now he is just incessantly negative about a lot of things that baffle me. He shits on Mega Man 10, he shits on Yooka-Laylee, he shots on Dragon Quest XI's soundtrack, and really in every video he does, there's always at least one very bullish, hard-headded, massively unfair opinion he has about something were he just routinely DUNKS on things that have either no problem with them, or very minor problems with them. Seems like every few years when I come back to see what he's doing, I have some problem with a lot of what he's saying. I'm not the only one it seems. He seems to be creating and attracting a lot of negativity and controversy with a lot of the things he says, which I regard as very clueless in most instances.
Some corrections. 9:40 - Famicom Disk System games don't have battery backup. The whole point of the disk card media was the fact that save data was easily writable without the need of battery. 13:30 - As for Contra, it's not that Konami didn't want to make a special chip for the U.S. version so much so as it is the fact that the Famicom and NES reads their cartridge pins differently and Konami's VRC series of chips made use of pins that were not on the NES (it's hard to explain without going too technical). I get the impression the NES Contra was the actual original, since the cutscenes, background animation and hidden ending in the Famicom version are extra stuff that wasn't based on anything in the arcade game (and on top of that, the Famicom version is a bit more polished in some minor instances like the different stage clear music for the final boss and the sound test mode). It's quite telling that the Famicom version of Super Contra didn't have any of that extra content from the first FC game and is almost identical to the U.S. NES version. Also, I kinda liked Snake's Revenge and never had any issue with its difficulty.
Good corrections - I believe one of the details about Famicom game extra chips that's often not talked about is how the individual companies in Japan would make their own carts with their own chips (Like the VRC6) but in the US/World Nintendo themselves manufactured the carts and did not/would not use 3rd party chips which is another reason Castlevania 3 ended up with a regular MMC chip from Nintendo.
@@OhmiKuma This video doesn't even bring up Jackal on the NES, which is one of the rare instances when Konami actually made a better version for the US. The Japanese version, Akai Yousai, was released for the Famicom Disk System and had its levels shortened to such an extent to fit the smaller media format.
Derek born and raised, Grace since elementary school. And that copy of Snake’s Revenge was bought by Derek at Video City when they were liquidating all their old games to make room for newer consoles.
I remember playing contra force quite a bit when I was a kid. It does have that awesome opening level music though and the ability to play as 4 different characters.
To this day I still don't understand the love Rondo of Blood gets. I mean, it's fine, it's got some good ideas, but I don't think they were executed that well. Maria just straight up breaks the game in terms of difficulty, and the branching paths are not branching as such, more like the normal path, and a hidden path behind layers and layers of asinine secrets. For years I read from Castlevania Dungeon how Rondo was so much better than that sad Dracula X on the SNES, which I actually liked, so I was so stoked to play it when it was released on the PSP, and felt a resounding "meh" go over me. The same feeling stayed with me in Castlevania Requiem earlier this fall. A good game, with lots of flaws on the game design side. I actually much prefer Dracula X. It's not even near some of the best games in the series either, but at least it's a nice, tight package, with much improved visuals over Rondo.
It had the mystique of being a hard to access import for a long time. So many people built it up in their imaginations for years and/or paid out the ass to import it that they have an investment in angerly demanding that everyone else agree it's the bestest Castlevania ever. Without those goggles, it's a very unbalanced and gimmicky game lacking entirely the fierce challenge the best entries in the series are known for. CV1, CV3, Bloodlines, CV X68000, and, yes, Dracula X are all the real deal.
@@willmistretta The core elements which Rondo of Blood lacks, is Super Castlevania IV's dark atmosphere and Bloodlines' action and challenge. The main reasons that people give praise to Rondo of Blood (like me), is its variety, the saving system and the cd quality soundtrack.
@@elefsidi Hey, it's great that you like it. Really. I guess I'm just reacting against what I see as the unreasonable levels of insistence by some that it's this flawless, godlike achievement that puts the rest of the series to shame. The fanatics that cruise every retro gaming Internet venue available acting like Jehovah's Witnesses for it really are absurd.
WOAH! Does the version of Contra with screens do anything with that concept? Like... every screen is basically a puzzle of kill without dying. Instead of twitch-based reaction it becomes: clear screen, then new screen and "here's a milisecond to take in your brand new surroundings, now kill without getting killed". That sounds neat.
I LOVE the Probotector games - they are an insanely elaborate way to skirt around violence laws. Back when I was doing art for J2ME version of FarCry 2, we decided to add Probotector mode to the game for shits and giggles, replacing player and all enemies with robots. The mode never got finished, but I believe you can still unlock Probotector (obviously renamed for legal reasons) as a playable character in that game.
@@GiordanDiodato Yes but there are a lot of differences between Life Force & Salamander and also between the Arcade, NES / Famicom & PC Engine versions.
No mention of Mad City/The Adventures of Bayou Billy? Shame, is an obscure game, but infamous for being made worse in the west(mostly due to being made almost unplayably difficult: the enemies do double damage, take half damage, and have far more aggressive AI, the shooting segments give you way less bullets and the driving sections in the US feature instant death instead of a life bar and much more narrow roads)
If Simon's Quest was on the Famicon Disk System, then it didn't have "battery-backed saves"; those are exclusive to cartridge games, FDS games just saved to the disk.
Wanted to mention because it wasn't in here, the latest Contra game is Hard Corps: Uprising for the PS3 and Xbox360. It's a prequel to Contra: Hard Corps. Daisuke Ishiwatari, of Guilty Gear fame, apparently was artist & composer of the game. Had to give the shoutout because I like it a lot. But it's a 2011, low-budget release, so don't expect to be blown away.
It wasn't because Konami didn't want to make the chips for the west. It was because Nintendo of America wouldn't allow them. This is also why the NES version of CV3 lacked the extra graphical and musical features.
nowonmetube not really. You're confusing the additional sound channels provided by the FDS with the NES's 12 additional pins and shuffled pin layout. Nothing can be done about the FDS's additional channels short of hooking one up to the NES. And that takes adaptors and some creative application. However all Akuma-jo Densetsu requires to play on the NES is a pin adaptor and you're set... provided you're using a model 2 NES or you've disabled the toaster's lockout chip. This is because, while having 12 more pin, the NES just uses a shuffled arrangement of the same 60 pins as the famicom. All an adaptor does is sort which pins go to what, making sure that the famicom cart's pins connect to the correct pins on its NES counterpart. So long as you use an adaptor and an actual NES the famicom version of Akuma-jo Densetsu will work on an American NES, so long as the lockout chip is disabled. The real secret with Akuma-Jo Densetsu's improved graphics and sound is its additional chips... which Nintendo of America banned in licensed NES carts. PS disabling the lockout chip on the NES is a good idea anyway, as doing so prevents the blink of death which it causes when it doesn't/can't read the cart's security chip... which inevitably happens when either chip starts to wear out.
nowonmetube no... you need to do some research. Provided you're using an model 2 which didn't have a lockout chip or a original NES with the chip disabled, all you need to play akumajo densetsu on the NES is a 60 pin to 72 pin adapter. I'm dead serious.
Contra might be a hot mess but it's nothing compared to the Adventure Island/Wonder Boy/i'm not even going to list everything connected to these series because there are so many games.
Hey you're the guy who made that decent Contra 4 Review, i salute you. I personally think this guy was exaggerating a bit about Contra especially Contra Force since at least the game has nice graphics and music, and if you play it on an emulator you can get rid of the slowdown by overclocking the PPU i belive.
The cheat code which placed Snake near the end of Metal Gear for the NES actually damaged the game cart's memory, preventing one from ever playing the game from the beginning properly ever again as items and entire areas were gone from the game, preventing normal progress entirely.
Hard Corps Uprising was actually a contra game - and pretty darned good too... although... one can only listen to the last boss say "go to hell" so much before bursting out into tears.
